Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology

By Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson’s Lifeworlds is a masterful collection of essays, the culmination of a career aimed at understanding the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. Seeking the truths that are found in the interstices between examiner and examined, world and word, and body and mind, and taking inspiration from James, Dewey, Arendt, Husserl, Sartre, Camus, and, especially, Merleau-Ponty, Jackson creates in these chapters a distinctive anthropological pursuit of existential inquiry. More important, he buttresses this philosophical approach with committed empirical research. Traveling from the Kuranko in Sierra Leone to the Maori in New Zealand to the Warlpiri in Australia, Jackson argues that anthropological subjects continually negotiate—imaginatively, practically, and politically—their relations with the forces surrounding them and the resources they find in themselves or in solidarity with significant others. At the same time that they mirror facets of the larger world, they also help shape it. Stitching the themes, peoples, and locales of these essays into a sustained argument for a philosophical anthropology that focuses on the places between, Jackson offers a pragmatic understanding of how people act to make their lives more viable, to grasp the elusive, to counteract external powers, and to turn abstract possibilities into embodied truths.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226923666

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson is Senior Research Fellow in World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

Book preview

MICHAEL JACKSON is the Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92364-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92365-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92366-6 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92364-9 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92365-7 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92366-5 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jackson, Michael, 1940–

Lifeworlds : essays in existential anthropology / Michael Jackson.

pages ; cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92364-2 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92365-9 (paperback : alkaline paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92366-6 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92364-9 (cloth : alkaline paper)

[etc.]

1. Anthropology—Philosophy. 2. Ethnology—Sierra Leone. 3. Kuranko (African people). 4. Human body. 5. Existential phenomenology. I. Title.

GN33.J33 2013

301.01—dc23

2012011667

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Lifeworlds

Essays in Existential Anthropology

MICHAEL JACKSON

The University of Chicago Press    Chicago and London

To Francine, with love

[Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs] endowed the lowly social material of the proverb with an aesthetic, formal grandeur signaling its lofty philosophical importance, while the painting’s vivid descriptions retained a representational grip on the proverb’s common, comic types and situations. . . . His proverbs thus took on visually the quality of natural law so important in his art more generally. . . . On this universal level, the peasant works as an Everyman, as the figure of natural mankind whose folly pervades all social classes and groups.

ROBERT BALDWIN, LANGUAGE AND POWER IN BRUEGEL’S NETHERLANDISH PROVERBS

There is a delicate form of empiricism that enters into such a close relationship with its object that it thereby becomes theory. The general and the particular converge: the particular is the general, made manifest under different conditions.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, THOUGHTS ABOUT ART, ETHICS AND NATURE IN THE SPIRIT OF THE TRAVELERS, IN WILHELM MEISTER’S JOURNEYMAN YEARS, 1829

Contents

Preface

1. The Scope of Existential Anthropology

2. How to Do Things with Stones

3. Knowledge of the Body

4. The Migration of a Name: Alexander in Africa

5. The Man Who Could Turn into an Elephant

6. Custom and Conflict in Sierra Leone: An Essay on Anarchy

7. Migrant Imaginaries: With Sewa Koroma in Southeast London

8. The Stories That Shadow Us

9. Familiar and Foreign Bodies: A Phenomenological Exploration of the Human-Technology Interface

10. The Prose of Suffering

11. On Autonomy: An Ethnographic and Existential Critique

12. Where Thought Belongs: An Anthropological Critique of the Project of Philosophy

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Preface

Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected. . . . We live prospectively as well as retrospectively.

WILLIAM JAMES, ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM¹

In the mid-1980s, ethnography was under siege. The Writing Culture school had cast doubt on the empirical possibility of understanding others in their own terms, arguing that our supposedly transparent representations of other lifeworlds were largely artifacts of Western writing conventions and projections of Western worldviews.²

My personal life had also reached a critical juncture. Widowed and unemployed, I had nevertheless found unexpected fulfillment in my misfortune. My writing routine remained intact, I drew great satisfaction from my daughter’s well-being, and every day I would go for a long run to a nearby mountain where I would rest among lichen-covered rocks and watch the winter sun sink into the distant Brindabellas. Strange to say that at this nadir of my life, my sense of life itself had never been sharper, more charged with hope. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus observes that happiness and the absurd are sons of the same earth. I now understood what he meant, for the gritty surface of the stone Sisyphus shoved uphill each day (only to have it tumble back to the foot of the hill each night) imparted to the toiler a sense of living his own life, of life being literally in his own hands. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. . . . Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world.³ But while this acceptance of my circumstances was liberating, I hoped for a break from my intellectual solitude and penury. This came in 1987, in the form of an invitation to attend a Symposium on African Folk Models and Their Application at Uppsala University in Sweden and to remain in Uppsala for ten days after the conference to give seminars and lectures. My Uppsala sojourn was a turning point for me and marked the beginning of my close relationship with Uppsala University and Scandinavian anthropology. Moreover, for the first time in my life I met and became friends with other Africanists, including René Devisch, Ivan Karp, Susan Reynolds Whyte, Paul Riesman, and Anita Jacobson-Widding, who, until then, had only been names to me.

At Uppsala I taught a class on William James’s method of radical empiricism, arguing that the scope of anthropology could be enlarged not by compromising empirical method but by radicalizing it. Rather than perpetuate antinomies between self and other, observer and observed, body and mind, writing and world, reality and the imagination, or reason and emotion, we needed to explore the dialectic in human consciousness between the kinds of experiences such terms roughly designated. In this endeavor, however, we had to resist the allure of language, particularly our tendency to assume that the forms of our thought mirrored the constitution of the world. This emphasis on the relational and the transitive rather than substantives and intransitives underpinned the essays I had been publishing from the early 1970s—on embodiment, divination, myth and mortality, storytelling, metaphor, shape-shifting and witchcraft—essays that I now decided to bring together under the title Paths toward a Clearing. The deeper thematic of these essays reflected my experiences among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, where speech and action are understood as intersubjective rather than merely subjective modes of being, and agency is identified with one’s capacity to generate, perpetuate, and celebrate life as well as one’s ability to stoically endure its hardships. These themes are also articulated in Husserl’s later work, where his concepts of generative phenomenology and lifeworld underscore the fact that we live in a world of intersubjective relationships, directly conscious and plainly certain of this experience before anything is established scientifically, whether in physiology, psychology, or sociology concerning its nature.⁴ In adopting Husserl’s concept of lifeworld, however, I did not want to fall into the trap of dividing naïve or natural attitudes from theorized worldviews but of exploring the indeterminate relationship between them.

The course of one’s life, like the itinerary of one’s thought, is marked by lucky breaks as well as tragic setbacks, by fortuitous encounters as well as missed opportunities. During my years of unemployment in Canberra, Australia, I had met Michael Herzfeld, who invited me to spend a few days at Indiana University, Bloomington, on my way back to Australia from Sweden. Though I was oblivious to this at the time, Michael felt grateful for my friendship and support during the months he had spent in Canberra in 1985 as a visiting research fellow, and on his return to the United States he had begun exploring possibilities of bringing me to Indiana. In Bloomington, I gave a poetry reading and delivered the same talks I had given in Uppsala, unaware that I was being considered for a professorship. Paths was published in 1989, the same year I moved to Indiana and began the painfully slow process of readjusting to academia after years on the margins.

That my work reflects an unresolved tension between worldly and academic preoccupations is not simply because my professional career has been punctuated by periods away from academia; the tension was present during my undergraduate years as I moved from lecture halls and libraries to work on the waterfront or in factories, not only out of economic necessity but because of the deep discomfort I felt about the separation of the vita contemplativa from the vita activa.

The profession and practice of ethnography answered a personal need, providing a rhythm between absorption in the world of books and engagement in the world. Ethnography also opened my eyes to the many paths one may take in life to find a clearing, and brought me to an understanding that, for every cleared space, there are many false trails and dead ends. Heidegger’s notion of clearing (lichtung) speaks to that which is continually being brought forth, given presence, revealed, or made apparent in the speech and actions of our everyday lives. For the Kuranko of northeast Sierra Leone, a forest clearing defines a space of sociality and moral personhood in the wilderness of the world. But many paths peter out or become blocked, and my work would become increasingly preoccupied by the crises and impasses in life—those gaps that the Greeks called aporiai, because there appears no way through the no-man’s-land in which we sometimes find ourselves lost, no way of reconciling our impulse to grasp the world (cognitively, practically, or ritually) with our sense that the world is largely beyond our comprehension and control.⁵ What I sought was a way of marrying philosophical skepticism and social hope—avoiding, on the one hand, the hubris that awaits us when we go beyond the limits of what we may know or the limits of what we may usefully do for the good of others, yet achieving, on the other hand, ways of thinking, writing, and acting that may make some positive difference to one and all.

Crucial to this search is learning to strike a balance between one’s involvement in two kinds of lifeworld—the first intimate and immediate, the second more abstract and remote. These two lifeworlds correspond roughly to what ancient Greek and Chinese thought distinguished as microcosm and macrocosm. The question as to how relations between these realms are to be managed conceptually, ethically, politically, and practically is also a pressing question for anthropology, which still struggles to integrate the highly particularistic, localized perspectives of ethnography (ethnos) with the generalizing ambition implied by the all-encompassing notion of humankind (anthropos).⁶

When I went to Central Australia to do fieldwork among the Warlpiri, this dialectic between the particular and the general was immediately brought to mind.

One thing that struck me time and time again during our early days in the desert, before my wife Francine and I fell in with Warlpiri and no longer had much time to ourselves, was how quickly the neutral and anonymous space of the world gets transformed into a place you think of as your own. You turn off a desert track, drive across spinifex, bumping over the rough ground toward a desert oak, stop the vehicle, get out, build a fire, boil a billy, lay out your swags, and within half an hour an area that had no prior or particularly personal associations begins to take on meanings that are uniquely yours. Everything you do and say and feel in that place intensifies this almost proprietal sense that you and the place are now inextricably linked. This transformation, whereby something we think of as impersonal and other—as an it—becomes something we experience as personal—as ours—is one of the miracles of human life. Millions of human beings share the same language, yet each and every individual will, at any given moment, be creating, within the parameters of a strict syntax, combinations and permutations of time-worn words that capture and communicate the phenomenological quiddity of things as he or she experiences them. The same is true of stories. The narrative forms known to humanity are finite and ubiquitous. Yet in the ways we adopt and engage with these master narratives, we communicate experiences that we feel are singularly our own. As for other human beings, we see them simply as faces in a crowd, as an anonymous mass, until we enter into dialogue with them. Forthwith a stranger suddenly possesses a voice, a history, a name—and what transpires between us may change our lives forever.

But what relevance did these ruminations have for understanding how Warlpiri experienced their world?

Where we might speak of human existence as a relationship between diametrically opposite domains—being and nothingness, order and chaos, self and other, or culture and nature—Warlpiri speak of an interplay between patency (palka) and latency (lawa). This is somewhat like the interplay in Maori thought between tupu (the unfolding or growing potentiality of every living thing) and mate (the process of weakening, sickening, or diminishing). Nothing is static or fixed in these lifeworlds; everything is waxing or waning, and as one life comes into being, another fades away. Identity thus emerges and lapses in accordance with a person’s changing relationships with others and with the ancestral earth.

This interplay of palka and lawa in Warlpiri thought inspired new directions in my own thinking.

Palka means embodied in present time (jalanguju palkalku). Lawa means just the opposite. The words apply equally to the perpetual coming and going in Warlpiri social life and to the flux of things. Anything that has body is palka—a rock hole or river with water in it, the trunk of a tree, a person whose belly is full, country where game is plentiful, a person who is present. But if a rock hole is dry, a stomach is empty, tracks erased, or a person faints, falls asleep, goes away, or dies, then there is lawa, absence. Palka is that which is existent, the wherewithal of life, including people and possessions. By contrast, lawa connotes the loss of the persons and things that sustain one’s life. Just as persons disperse then gradually come together again (pina yani), so ceremony can bring the ancestral order back into being, fleshing it out in the painting, song, and mimetic dance of the living. Giving birth to a child, singing up the country, or dancing the Dreaming into life are all modes of bringing forth being (palka jarrimi). And the passage from absence to presence is like the passage from night to day.

That which has been, however, always leaves a trace. And these traces are sometimes ancestral, sometimes personal, though these two domains flow imperceptibly and inevitably into one another. Thus, while the body of the land carries the imprint (yirdi) of ancestral journeys and epochal events, it also bears traces of the living as they move about upon it in the course of their lives. By the same token, every individual’s body is the site of a similar merging of mythical and personal time. A man may reincarnate traits of a Dreaming ancestor, and his body will come to bear scars (murru), such as initiatory weals on the chest and sorry marks on the thighs that are manifestations of the Law. Yet everybody also carries idiosyncratic scars—from broken limbs, burns, fights, and aging—that recollect irregular and singular events. It is the same with names. A nickname commemorating some incident in one’s life will complement the Dreaming name one inherits from an ancestor.

Warlpiri attitudes toward footprints nicely capture the ways in which the ancestral and the personal coalesce. After a death, the footprints of the deceased are systematically erased from the earth. Groups of kinswomen, their foreheads, cheeks, upper arms, and breasts caked with wood ash and kaolin, move through the settlement trailing wilted branches of eucalypt, clearing away the footprints of the deceased, rubbing out every trace of his or her presence. In this way, the dead lose their singular identity and enter ancestral time as spirits.

Footprints are also crucial to respecting the Law in everyday life. I could not go to my brother’s camp, Jerry Jangala reminisced, because his wife might be there. If I wanted to see my brother, we would have to meet somewhere else. I wasn’t even allowed to cross my brother’s wife’s tracks, first I would have to wipe them out with my foot and only then I could go on. And if my brother would see his wife’s tracks and mine going in the same direction, there would be a big fight, I would not be able to convince him I hadn’t even seen his wife.⁷

Finally, footprints are studied for the insights they give into events that have taken place in one’s absence. Michael Terry describes this nicely, if Eurocentrically (for Aboriginals are less interested in identifying a person from his or her prints than with gleaning information about the actions and events in which that person was involved): An old Aboriginal recently saw some human footprints on a patch of sand near the Alice Springs railway station. He looked at the tracks intently, scratched his head and said, ‘Michael Terry’s in town.’ There would have been nothing remarkable about that but for one thing: the Aboriginal had not seen my tracks for twenty-five years.⁸

Michael Terry goes on to describe the idiosyncratic character of his footprints—the result of a habit of dragging his left foot slightly, which left a thin trail in the sand on the outside of the heel. Men’s prints differ from women’s in similarly subtle ways. Men’s toes lie flat and are extended; women’s toes are gathered more, and women leave an inswept imprint behind the ball of the foot as a result of carrying loads and having, as a result, flattened arches. Old men have flatter and more even prints; younger men are more sprightly and step more on the toes.

Aboriginal people also track the imprint of tires on dusty desert roads as assiduously as they track human footprints, pointing out that although all tires appear alike to the unobservant eye, each has an idiosyncratic tread and unique pattern of wear and tear that make it readily identifiable as belonging to a particular vehicle, a particular person.

Observations and experiences like these have reinforced my view that anthropology must deploy a double perspective that encompasses particular situations—local, familial, and personal—and general conditions—global, national, cosmopolitan, historical, and human. The chapters in this book are attempts to realize this vision, as well as to chronicle one person’s ethnographic journeys and the reflections these inspired. For without my intellectual forebears, my family, the people that received me, a stranger, into their lifeworlds, and the friendships formed in fieldwork, these transient testimonies would never have existed, and though they, like other human testimonies, will inevitably disappear, the life against which their worth may be measured and to which they pay homage will remain for others, who, in their turn, will seek their own paths toward a clearing.

Lifeworlds

ONE

The Scope of Existential Anthropology

You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither one nor the other.

GILLES DELEUZE, DIALOGUES¹

Like other human sciences, anthropology has drawn inspiration from many disciplines and sought to build its identity through association with them. But the positivism that anthropology hoped to derive from the natural sciences proved to be as elusive as the authenticity it sought from the humanities. Moreover, though lip service was paid to the models and methods of biology, ecology, psychology, fluid mechanics, structural linguistics, topology, quantum mechanics, mathematics, economics, and general systems theory, anthropologists seldom deployed these analytically or systematically. Rather, they were adopted as images and metaphors.² Thus, society was said to function like a living organism, regulate energy like a machine, to be structured like language, organized like a corporation, comparable to a person, or open to interpretation like a text.

Anthropology also sought definition in delimitation. In the same way that societies protect their identities and territories by excluding persons and proclivities that are perceived as threats, so discursive regimes seek definition by discounting experiences that allegedly lie outside their purview. In the establishment of anthropology as a science of the social or the cultural, entire domains of human experience were occluded or assigned to other disciplines, most notably the lived body, the life of the senses, ethics and the imagination, the emotions, materiality and technology. Subjectivity was conflated with roles, rules, routines, and rituals. Individual variations were seen as deviations from the norm. Contingency was played down. Collective representations determined the real. Experience was deduced from creeds, charters, and cosmologies. And just as the natural sciences created the appearance of objectivity through specialized, analytical language, so the social sciences cultivated an image of objectivity by reducing persons to functions and identities: individuals filled roles, fulfilled obligations, followed rules, performed rituals, and internalized beliefs. As such, persons were depicted one-dimensionally, their lives little more than allegories and instantiations of political, historical, or social processes. To all intents and purposes, society alone defined the good, and human beings were slaves to this transcendent ideality.

That these sociological reductions could gain currency undoubtedly reflected a Western tradition of the scholar as hierophant or seer—someone possessing extraordinary powers of understanding, an expert able to solve problems and explain mysteries by reference to factors or forces beyond our ordinary or vernacular grasp. Invoking the supposedly higher powers of reason and logic, the intellectual saw his or her task as the discovery of hidden causes, motives, and meanings. Paul Ricoeur characterizes this tradition as a school of suspicion. In the work of the three great masters of suspicion—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—consciousness is mostly false consciousness. By implication, the truth about our thoughts, feelings, and actions is inaccessible to the conscious mind and can only be brought to light by experts in interpretation and deciphering.³ Although Henry Ellenberger traces this unmasking trend back to the seventeenth-century French moralists, it finds ubiquitous expression in the suspicion that true reality is never the most obvious, and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive.⁴

To what extent, however, was this quest for analytical coherence, narrative closure, or systematic knowledge a reflection of the intellectual’s anxiety at the mysteries, confusions, and contingencies of life, or the need to acquire a professional facade with which to advance a career? Could language and thought ever fully capture, cover, or contain the wealth of human experience, or hope to mirror the thing-in-itself? Curiously enough, the critique of this alienated view of human existence came not from within the social sciences but from philosophy. In the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, the existenz philosophies of Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Hannah Arendt, the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the existential-phenomenological thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—to mention only those thinkers in relation to whom I developed my own lebensphilosophie—five themes prevail. First, the relational character of human existence that Heidegger called being-in-the-world (Dasein). As the hyphens suggest, our own world (eigenwelt) is inextricably tied up with the world of others (mitwelt) and the physical environment of which we are also vitally a part (umwelt). Husserl used the term intersubjectivity to capture the sense in which we, as individual subjects, live intentionally or in tension with others as well as with a world that comprises techniques, traditions, ideas, and nonhuman things. By implication, our relationships with the world of others and the world around are relations of inter-est, that is, they are modes of inter-existence, informed by a struggle for the wherewithal for life. We are, therefore, not stable or set pieces, with established and immutable essences, destinies, or identities; we are constantly changing, formed and reformed, in the course of our relationships with others and our struggle for whatever helps us sustain and find fulfillment in life. That these relationships are dynamic and problematic is self-evident: life resources—whether wealth or water, food or finery—are scarce, and what enriches one may cause the impoverishment of another, and what gives life to one may spell the death of another.

The term intersubjectivity—or what Hannah Arendt calls the subjective in-between—shifts our emphasis away from notions of the person, the self, or the subject as having a stable character and abiding essence, and invites us to explore the subtle negotiations and alterations of subjective experience as we interact with one another, intervocally or dialogically (in conversation or confrontation), intercorporeally (in dancing, moving, fighting, or competing), and introceptively (in getting what we call a sense of the other’s intentions, frame of mind, or worldview). But several important provisos must be made. First, intersubjectivity is not a synonym for empathy or fellow feeling, since it covers relations that are harmonious and disharmonious, peaceable and violent. Second, intersubjectivity may be used of relations between persons and things, since things are often imagined to be social actors, with minds of their own, and persons are often treated as though they were mere things. Third, intersubjectivity implies both fixed and fluid aspects, which is to say that one’s sense of participation in the lives of others never completely eclipses a sense of oneself as an autonomous subject. In William James’s terms, consciousness constantly oscillates between intransitive and transitive extremes, like a bird that is sometimes perched or nesting, and sometimes on the wing.⁵ A theory of consciousness that singled out the intransitive and downplayed the transitive—or vice versa—would be as absurd as a theory of birds that emphasized perching or nesting and failed to mention flight. Fourth, the intersubjective must be considered in relation to the intrapsychic, since we cannot fully understand the nature of social interactions without understanding what is going on in an actor’s mind—that is to say, intrapsychically. If we are to have a science of relationality, we therefore need to complement a sociological perspective with a psychological one. We need to consider the co-presence of a sense of ourselves as singular and a sense of ourselves as social, of ourselves as having an enduring form and as being susceptible to transformation.

A second major theme in existential anthropology concerns the ambiguity of the term subject, since the notion of an individual subject—self or other—entails a more abstract, discursive notion of subject, as in the phrases, My subject is anthropology or I am a New Zealand subject. To cite Adorno, Neither one can exist without the other, the particular only as determined and thus universal, the universal only as the determination of a particular and thus itself particular. Both of them are and are not. This is one of the strongest motives of a nonidealist dialectics.⁶ Accordingly, any social microcosm (e.g., a circle of friends, a family, a small community) has to be understood in relation to the cultural, linguistic, historical, geopolitical, or global macrocosm in which it is embedded.⁷ But neither the personal nor the political, the particular or the abstract, senses of subjectivity can be postulated as prior. They are mutually arising; each is the condition of the possibility of the other—which is why international relations, like abstract relations in philosophy, not only have recourse to metaphors of interpersonal life but are actually conducted in intersubjective terms, while interpersonal life is reciprocally shaped by the transpersonal and impersonal structures of the polis.

Third, our humanity is at once shared and singular. This paradox of plurality means that we both identify with others and differentiate ourselves from them. Although the expression ‘particular person’ requires the concept of species simply in order to be meaningful,⁸ the particular person cannot be disappeared into a discursive category without violence. Identity connotes both idem (being identical or the same) and ipse (being self in contrast to other).⁹ Accordingly, human beings seek individuation and autonomy as much as they seek union and connection with others. As Otto Rank observed, we possess both a will to separate and a will to unite. Consequently, we continually find ourselves on the cusp of the impossible: Man . . . wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can’t stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can’t allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof.¹⁰

A fourth theme is that the meaning of any human life cannot be reduced to the conceptual language with which we render it intelligible or manageable. Against the grain of much European philosophy, being and thought are not assumed to be identical. As Dewey put it, "What is really ‘in’ experience extends much further than that which at any time is known."¹¹ Adorno’s negative dialectics echo the same idea: "Represented in the inmost cell of thought is that which is unlike thought.¹² If I prefer the term lifeworld to culture or society," it is because I want to capture this sense of a social field as a force field (kraftfeld), a constellation of both ideas and passions, moral norms and ethical dilemmas, the tried and true as well as the unprecedented, a field charged with vitality and animated by struggle.¹³ Even more urgently, Adorno’s concept of nonidentity helps liberate anthropology from one of its most persistent fallacies, namely, the tendency to presuppose an isomorphic relation between words and world, or between experience and episteme. Even with the best will in the world, human beings seldom speak their minds or say exactly what is in their hearts. Rather, we express what is in our best interests, both personal and interpersonal. German critical theory and psychoanalysis caution us not to infer subjective experience directly from verbal accounts, collective representations, or conventional wisdom. Yet anthropologists often claim that a peoples’ shared symbols and vernacular images are windows onto their inner experience, so that the claim that persons share their humanity with animal familiars or doubles, or that stones are animate, may be taken literally. But no one in his or her right mind experiences the extrahuman world as permanently human or intrinsically animate. It would be impossible to apply oneself to the everyday tasks of cooking food, raising children, or making a farm if one confused self and other, or experienced one’s being as diffused into the being of the world at large. Among the Ojibwa, for example, there is an implicit category distinction in the language between animate and inanimate. Although stone, thunder, and objects such as kettles and pipes are grammatically animate and Ojibwa sometimes speak of stones as if they were persons, this does not mean that Ojibwa are animists "in the sense that they dogmatically attribute living souls to inanimate objects such as stone; rather they recognize potentialities for animation in certain classes of objects under certain circumstances. The Ojibwa do not perceives stones, in general, as animate, any more than we do."¹⁴ Among the Kuranko, it is axiomatic that will and consciousness are not limited to human beings, but distributed beyond the world of persons, and potentially found in totemic animals, fetishes, and even plants. The attributes of moral personhood (morgoye) may indeed be exemplified in the behavior of totemic animals, divinities, and the dead, while antisocial people may lose their personhood entirely, becoming like broken vessels or ruined houses. In other words, being is not necessarily limited to human being.¹⁵ But this is a human projection, a human understanding. And it is a potential state of affairs, not an actual or inevitable one. Thus, in chapter 5 I describe an ambitious but disappointed individual who invokes the power of his clan totem, the elephant, to imagine himself transformed into a person of real presence and power. This experiential transformation is episodic, illusory, and by no means common—despite its logical possibility, since Kuranko posit permeable boundaries between human and animal, town and bush, subject and object. But even Kuranko do not conflate epistemologies (that which is spelled out in knowledge claims about the nature of the world) and ontologies (ways in which people actually experience their being-in-the-world). As a Kuranko adage succinctly puts it, the word fire cannot burn down a house.

Fifth, human existence involves a dynamic relationship between how we are constituted and how we constitute ourselves, between what is already there in the world into which we are born and what emerges in the course of our lives within that world. That both anthropology and psychology are sciences of human relationships—intrapsychic as well as intersubjective—undermines the positivist claims sometimes made for them, since the meanings and experiences that emerge in the course of any human interaction, conversation, or life history go beyond the relata involved. Although we may identify such relata as individual persons, named groups, or specific events and consider them stable over time, our knowledge of them always reflects our changing relation to them. Werner Heisenberg called this the uncertainty principle. What we know of the world depends on how we interact with it. Our methods and personalities alter and partially constitute the nature of what we observe. "We can no longer speak of the behavior of the particle independently of the process of observation. As a final consequence, the natural laws formulated mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the elementary particles themselves but with our knowledge of them."¹⁶ Since what transpires in the transitional space between persons is always, in some sense, unpredictable and new, one can never reduce the meaning of a human life to the conditions of its possibility or to the retrospective account of that life that a person or group of persons may render as story, analysis or commentary. To echo Sartre, a person always makes something of what he or she is made. And this defines our freedom: the small movement which makes a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him.¹⁷ Although we may identify certain factors in our history, our genes, our class, or our culture that determine the limits of our human potentiality, there are always turning points, fortuitous encounters, epigenetic factors, and fateful events that just as forcefully impact upon the ways in which latent possibilities are or are not realized.

Given these considerations, the focus of existential anthropology is the paradox of plurality and the ambiguity of intersubjective life. Although we exist as both singular beings and participants in wider fields of being that encompass other people, material things, and abstractions, our relations with ourselves and with others are uncertain, constantly changing, and subject to endless negotiation. Accordingly, calls for sinking our differences and fostering universal equality are utopian ideals. As Adorno notes, the realization of universality as a permanent and unitary state can only be accomplished through the violent ironing out of differences. By contrast, an emancipated society is one that achieves coexistence in difference.¹⁸

Ethnographic Method and the Philosophical Turn

While philosophy continues to address Kant’s question about what it means to be human, ethnography provides one of the most edifying methods for exploring Kant’s preoccupation with the relation between what is given (a priori) and what is chosen in human life—what is predetermined by nature or nurture, what emerges from experience, and what lies within our power to decide, to know, to do, or to be.¹⁹ What separates us from Kant’s anthropology, however, is a commitment to explore empirically the lived experience of actual people in everyday situations before venturing suggestions as to what human beings may have in common, irrespective of their personal, cultural, or religious circumstances. As Veena Das puts it, our goal is not some kind of ascent into the transcendent but a descent into everyday life that implies a refusal to place ourselves above others through the repression of their voices or views and the privileging of our own.²⁰

The history of anthropology’s engagement with philosophy from the eighteenth century is yet to be written. But as Robert Orsi observes, in religious scholarship and intellectual history alike, "people’s lives are always there, in one way or another. This is true even when the matters we are thinking about are huge and abstract. . . . There are always lives within our ideas."²¹

Let me explore this proposition autobiographically, indicating why I turned to philosophy in my determination to do justice to my fieldwork experiences in Sierra Leone and Aboriginal Australia over a forty-year period.

Rendering an account of one’s own intellectual history is fraught with difficulties. One is seldom in a position to comprehend the meaning of one’s work any more than one is able to sum up the meaning of one’s life. One’s current work is too close to examine with much critical clarity, and one’s early work is so distant that one is a stranger to it. But of one thing I am certain: for reasons I cannot fully fathom I embraced from an early age the view captured in Terence’s famous dictum, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me). Moreover, I felt I could not make this dictum my own unless I was prepared to test it in the real world. In George Devereux’s psychoanalytic anthropology I would subsequently find scientific arguments for the psychic unity of humankind—the assumption that if anthropologists were to draw up a complete list of all types of cultural behavior, this list would overlap, point by point, with a similarly complete list of impulses, wishes, fantasies, etc., obtained by psychoanalysts in a clinical setting, implying that each person is a complete specimen of Man and each society a complete specimen of Society.²²

That I was drawn to ethnography was because it licensed the kind of controlled experimentation on myself that might enlarge my understanding of what it means to be human. Ethnography throws one into a world where one cannot be entirely oneself, where one is estranged from the ways of acting and thinking that sustain one’s accustomed sense of identity. This emotional, intellectual, social, and sensory displacement can be so destabilizing that one has to fight the impulse to run for cover, to retrieve the sense of groundedness one has lost. But it can also be a window of opportunity, a way of understanding oneself from the standpoint of another, or from elsewhere.

This is not to imply that one can enter completely into the lifeworld of others, standing in their shoes, as we say. Nor does it imply the possibility of ever understanding the human, since that would require a comprehensive knowledge of how the world has appeared to everyone who lives and has ever lived. Ethnographic understanding simply means that one may glimpse oneself as one might be or might have been under other circumstances, and come to the realization that knowledge and identity are emergent properties of the unstable relationship between self and other, here and there, now and then, and not fixed and final truths that one has been privileged to possess by virtue of living in one particular society at one particular moment in history.

Although I agree with Kenelm Burridge’s definition of the goal of ethnography as metanoia—an on-going series of transformations each one of which alters the predicates of being²³—few people are likely to ponder their own worldview as it appears from the standpoint of another unless circumstances compel them to. In reality, understanding is usually a result of enforced displacement, of crises that wrench a person out of his or her habitual routines of thought and behavior, rather than a product of philosophical choice or idle curiosity. Understanding others requires more than an intellectual movement from one’s own position to theirs; it involves physical upheaval, psychological turmoil, and moral confusion. This is why suffering is an inescapable concomitant of understanding—the loss of the illusion that one’s own particular worldview holds true for everyone, the pain of seeing in the face and gestures of a stranger the invalidation of oneself. And it is precisely because such hazards and symbolic deaths are the cost of going beyond the borders of the local world that we complacently regard as the measure of the world that most human beings resist seeking to know others as they know themselves. By this same token, we find the most striking examples of how human beings suffer and struggle with the project of enlarging their understanding in those parts of the world where deterritorialization has become an unavoidable condition of existence. It is here, in what Jaspers called border situations (grenzsituationen), rather than in European salons and seminar rooms, that we may recognize and be reconciled to the painful truth that the human world constitutes our common ground, our shared heritage, not as a place of comfortably consistent unity but as a site of contingency, difference, and struggle.

What, then, is the value of exchanging comfort for hardship, of trying to see the world from the vantage point of others? Hermes, the patron of thieves, traders, travelers, and heralds, is also an obvious candidate for patron saint of ethnography, since he stands on the border or at the crossroads between quite different countries of the mind.²⁴ But what message is born of his transgression and trickery? First, that oracular wisdom requires unsettling and questioning what we customarily take for granted or consider true. As a corollary, cultivating an ironic distance from our own conventional wisdom helps prevent the arrogance of seeing all contrary views as false and all dissenters as threats. Second, is the value of doubt, for it is through the loss of firm